Responsible Innovation for a Sustainable Future

Innovation involves creating value from ideas, but this raises the question of for whom is the value created?  Especially at a time when there is growing recognition of global challenges such as poverty, inequality, aging population or availability of quality healthcare (European Commission, 2012; Lund declaration, 2009), responsible research and innovation (RRI) is suggested as a way to govern innovation development. Principles suggest a broader stakeholder inclusion during the decision-making process, anticipation of societal needs and reflection of concerns (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe, 2012; Owen, Bessant, Heintz, 2013; von Schomberg 2013), which calls for new innovation policies (Kuhlmann and Rip, 2018; Thapa et al. 2019). The failure of institutions to include all layers of society into decision-making processes can lead to a sense of an individual powerlessness. Combined with digital media platforms, this can give rise to fundamental instability, such as the “yellow vests” in France, protests against Brexit, division in the US politics.

While the theoretical development has focused on normative models of RRI, relatively few empirical studies exiss. Further, the literature mostly concerns research projects rather than their implementation at the firm level (Blok and Lemmens, 2015; Da Silva et al. 2019). Despite the recognition of the importance and value of stakeholder-inclusion in the product development process, RRI often involves articulating a process of governance with a strongly normative loading, without clear practical guidelines toward implementation practices (Ribeiro et al, 2017). The principles of RRI direct us to involve the user early in the innovation process, but they lack direction on whom to involve, how to involve them, and at what stage (De Silva et al. 2019). While several researchers claim that RRI is advantageous for businesses (Stahl and Coeckelbergh, 2016; Stahl et al. 2017), other studies point to the negative effects of RRI for innovation processes (Rivard, Lehoux, Miller 2019).

With this background, we follow the argument that responsibility lies with individual actors (Oftedal et al, 2019) and that responsible decisions need to be undertaken at the firm level (Silva, Lefebvre, Oliveira, and Lehoux, 2020). We suggest there is scope for ‘responsible innovation’ (RI) approach which has a more fine-grained focus on the innovation itself (Iakovleva, Oftedal, Bessant, 2019; Silva, Lehoux, Miller, Denis, 2018) and may be more amenable to operationalization.

In this SI we invite theoretical and especially empirical contributions that focus on themes including:

• The usefulness of the responsible innovation concept
• How firms organize their entrepreneurial and innovation process to ensure responsible outcomes
• Responsible commercialization/ implementation of innovation
• How to incorporate responsibility in the creative process,
• How to develop responsible business models which ensure that during the innovation process firms anticipate, involve, reflect on stakeholder’s feedbacks
• Who to include, how to include and at what stage of innovation process?
• What kind of dynamic capabilities firms are needed for RRI?
• Assessment tools for RRI, for example to help to self-monitor firm’s behavior
• The role of policy in helping shape the environment for RRI

Prof. Dr. Tatiana Aleksandrovna Iakovleva
Prof. Dr. Elin Merethe Oftedal
Dr. Luciana Maines
Prof. Dr. John Bessant
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Responsible innovation process
• User and stakeholder engagement
• User and stakeholder innovation
• Responsible research and innovation
• Business models for responsible innovation
• Foresight, scenarios and anticipation
• Assessing current procedures
• Incorporating user responses
• Commercialization process
• RRI capabilities